How did you end up doing digital marketing job?

darklocal

darklocal

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I want to share my own story first.

I am working out of the country and I need to earn more so I can go back home. I look for different jobs online, did try Captcha, SurveryMonkey, Affiliate, and more. Then end up doing a virtual assistant job in Freelancer and Odesk (now Upwork), which is back 2009. Then study search engine optimization online.
 
I lived a life of being poor and working crap jobs. At my work I was always hanging out with one colleague, and he told me about his website - which was a very weird one.

I laughed at his website (obviously not in a bad way) and its content. I thought it was hilarious that this well-built and stoic guy had a website about such a girly thing. It was so strange.

Then he told me what he earned.

That's the day when I started.

I will always be grateful to that guy. Meeting him revolutionized my life for sure.
 
My cousins had computers, old Tandys and Commodore 64's. I loved them and tried to spend all my time at their house.

I loved Atari and similar systems too.

At school, I would play on the Macs and run SimCity on them and hog them up. My senior year in HS, I was an assistant in the computer lab. I'd make games on our TI-82's too.

When my mom finally got us a computer at our house, I would sit on it and get on AOL all day. Bored, I found a way to make a webpage with some basic HTML and later figured out how to host it online.

I was trying to make a mens magazine, like Mens Health at the time.

Then I realized the webpage did nothing ( no form sending, no analytics, no action, etc ) so I learned Perl. After I learned basic hack-ish Perl I realized no one was coming to my site and it was still worthless.

I also learned to manipulate DMOZ and Yahoo Directory. I even became an editor at one time to insert my own listings. This was my first taste of marketing. I also got into GoTo and started buying PPC clicks.

I started getting gigs to build other people webpages and get them traffic as well. I also started to learn PHP and other things. As the money started to roll in, I decided that instead of being an Architect, this would be my new career.

While I still worked a ton of normal jobs as I did this on the side, I landed my first job at an agency actually employed for digital marketing when my girls were born. I landed that first digital marketing job almost 6 years after I got my start building that first HTML page.

I applied to that job knowing I could do what they asked for, that I could do the job and had the skills. The only thing holding me back was I was never employed "officially" in this role before.. the experience and skills were just self taught. So I stretched the truth a bit about my background and got the interview and job.

I spent the next 4-5 years employed in various digital marketing roles at that company plus 2 more before I went out on my own. Meaning, no full-time job ( w2 employee ) of any kind ( digital or not ) and just working for myself as an affiliate marketer. Doing whatever I wanted in this space.
 
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For me,
It started back in Early to Late 2010.
I was always into Blogging and I saw the Adsense option, I thought, why not.
My first $100 check from Adsense tasted real good, that I almost wanted to quit my Part Time job, (Thank god I didn't).
Fast forward to the present, things changed, methods evolved, website changed but still in the game more or less.
However, it isn't limited to PPC anymore, I am also in affiliate marketing.
 
Pat Flynn! (Haha, anyone else?)

When I was in university, I studies Accounting. Hated it so much that I knew I'd never be an accountant. So I need to find another income source. Googled about making money online and found Pat Flynn. Started my journey that way - first success is building a made-for-adsense site and sold it for $10k in 9 months. Then suffered from Shiny Object Syndrome - tried affiliate marketing, dropshipping, quitting, back to the game, website design business, some affiliate marketing, info-products and now building a site with SEO.

So I guess after 9 years, I am back to where it all started - building websites with SEO. :wink:
 
Starting in Porn in 1998 building Galleries for TGP later for MGP and also FreeSites. With building this Stuff, learning more about HTML & CSS, and getting more and more into Affiliate Marketing as an Affiliate.
 
Started in 2016 by writing freelance content for a friend's website.
When I saw what his website was earning I looked to start my own website.
After a few years of tinkering with different websites I left my job today.
I'm starting my own business with multiple websites that are focused around product reviews and solving practical problems.
 
I started in 2011 I think when I learned that I could create a free website on blogspot and bring visitors from different countries. I used modified content from various sources. Then I learned Joomla & Drupal from a senior and built my first website on a custom domain name with Joomla. Created a few html templates as well. It was all for fun as i didn't knew that this could be monetized. I completed my B.tech and tried searching for a job as a coder for languages like C, C++ & .Net but didn't got much traction as I was not confident in my coding abilities. A friend suggested me to read about SEO and try for a job. I read on the internet about SEO with 2g connection and gave a few interviews. Got a very basic salary and joined headfirst without thinking about future. And here I am still working as a SEO executive at a tech firm in India... trying to start a few own projects to earn some side income
 
I started a B2B business a few years ago, where I had to get leads from emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings at events.

I got tired of the cold-calling/emailing and travel, so I decided to learn SEO in order to generate leads in a more passive manner.

Through youtube, I discovered a few affiliate marketers and I adapted the methods they mentioned to test them out on my business' website.

After seeing that SEO really worked, I straight away bought courses, set up an affiliate site and outsourced all the content from day 1.

I reached 5-figures in monthly revenue after just over a year (I spent a LOT on content), and then I started buying and creating more sites to build a portfolio. I see myself doing this for at least the next 5 years (the return on investment is extremely high).

When you set up a normal business, you do NOT become your own boss, because you have clients, suppliers etc that you are accountable to.

However with affiliate SEO, you really are your own boss.
 
Imagine being a teen in this era and they are creating videos how they drop-shipped made a ton of cash now they are investors. :smile:

But I did get started over at Warrior Forum and as a total newbie I saw a hot thread that was on fire for several days about an upcoming $2000 launch on CPA offers. And every other comment someone would ask what are CPA offers.

That gave me the idea to create an eBook/WSO on that topic and I just used real campaigns as case studies I observed and that 26 pager at $10 a pop sold 3000 copies with rave reviews.

But I was a total newbie back then and did not realize the real gold was that buyers list that trusted me.
 
Started out flipping sneakers, which got me into automation to get me those sneakers. That way I learned Python, and then I wanted to sell those bots, so I needed a website. I then learned HTML/CSS/JS to build websites and slowly got into digital marketing.

A couple months down the line, I stumbled across the dropshipping guru shit on YouTube and was completely sold. Probably watched thousands of videos while attempting it myself. Luckily never bought a course and lost ~500€ in the learning process of FB ads. I actually managed to do 1000€/week in sales on one of my dropshipping stores, no profit though, but still I learned a lot.

Started looking into other ways to make money online and started promoting CPA. Natural transition was to find something more long-term and got into more SEO and affiliate stuff.
 
I was building a SaaS product with a buddy of mine. We had no idea how to get customers. Nor how to market anything in that regard. Somehow I stumbled on Dan Kennedy, a sales copywriter. Read a book of his, SaaS project failed.

Roughly a year later I decided I wanted to write ads, become a 'direct response copywriter,' as I was inspired by Kennedy's occupation/work.

As I successfully did that, I learned more about marketing. And slowly my entrepreneurial spirit returned. I decided to start making my own products, sell my own stuff, and build my own info sites.

Still at the beginning of creating products and owning content. But that's been my path.
 
I got a PHP dev job I wasn’t qualified for during freshman year of college. My boss told me how he made $250/day slinging Pharma with SEO back in the day. That for me interested and I did the Challenge.co (?) or something. Then I found wicked fire from some people on real social dynamics. That got me into link selling. Then I went to the startup world and told them I was a link seller, the guy who made backlinks for SEO agencies who resold it to their clients. Tech companies are it up and that’s how I got to today. We do like 5 mill usd in SEO sales now. Cool 12 year journey.
 
I work at a digital marketing agency now. I've been working in direct response (digital media) since 2015. I had no idea the field existed. An old colleague passed along my resume at their job. I wasn't their first choice, but they needed a warm body... the rest is history!
 
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